Echoes Of Honor

substitute in close action for properly handled ships of the wall. But so far they've met every challenge thrown at them and performed even better than expected in almost every case. I submit to you, Sir, that Captain Harmon and her people have amply proved the first-stage practicality of Anzio.'

'You can submit whatever you like, Captain!' Holderman spat, and his eyes blazed dangerously. 'Fortunately, the decision is the board's, not yours, and we'll continue testing the concept until my colleagues and I are convinced these things have some real value.'

'I see.' Truman regarded him with calm, cold dispassion, then shrugged. 'Very well, Sir. I cannot, of course, fault your determination to do a full, complete, and impartial job of evaluating the concept.' Her voice might be cold, but the vitriol dripping from it could easily have stripped paint off a bulkhead. 'In the meantime, however, Captain Harmon and her officers have a great deal to do to prepare for tomorrow's exercises. May I suggest that you and I leave them to it?'

Holderman glared at her, but there was little he could say in reply. More to the point, she was Minotaur's captain, and he, despite the difference in their ranks, was only a visitor aboard her ship. If she chose to, she had the legal authority to order him out of the compartment—or entirely off the ship. It would be a suicidal career move, regardless of whatever sponsors or patrons she might have attracted, but the look in her eyes suggested she might not care a great deal just at the moment. Nor would being the subject of such an order do very much for Holderman's career. At the very least, it would make him a laughingstock. At worst, it might even convince people Truman was right about the LACs and that he was the one who'd been out of line. Which was ridiculous, of course, but not something he could afford to ignore.

'No doubt you're correct, Captain,' he said, and if her tone could have stripped paint, his was a flat declaration that she'd just made a mortal enemy. 'If you'll have my pinnace called away, I'll return to the orbital base to consult with the umpires about tomorrow's exercise.'

'Of course, Sir. It will be my pleasure.' Again, the words were harmless... and the tone in which they were delivered was deadly. He glared at her, then turned and stamped out of the compartment.

Truman watched the hatch close behind him, then turned to give her breathless juniors a crooked smile.

'If I could have one more moment of your time, Jackie?' she asked politely, and twitched her head at the hatch.

'Certainly, Ma'am,' Harmon replied, and the two of them stepped out into the passage beyond the briefing room. Holderman had already vanished, and Truman smiled again—more nearly naturally— at Minotaur's COLAC.

'I suppose I might have handled that just a bit more tactfully,' she observed, 'but the son of a bitch pissed me off.'

'Me, too,' Harmon agreed. 'All the same—'

'All the same, nothing we could possibly do could make him any more determined to scrub the entire project,' Truman interrupted. 'Although,' she added judiciously, 'I did do my best to inspire him to greater efforts.'

'You—?' Harmon blinked, then shook her head. 'Would you care to explain that?'

'It's simple enough, Jackie,' Truman said with a chuckle. 'He and Commodore Paget are the board's senior officers, and they've been sitting on the sim results for months. You and your people have blown the other side out of space over and over again, but they're damned if they'll admit it. Surely you've noticed that?'

'Well, yes. Of course I have,' Harmon admitted.

'Then what makes you think they'll stop sitting on the results?' Truman demanded. 'Worse, the two of them will go right on tinkering with the sim parameters until they manage to come up with a way for the defenders to swat your people in droves. And they're not idiots. In fact, both of them are superior conventional tacticians, however stupidly they may be acting in this instance. They will find a way, and you and I know it, because they're right about how fragile your LACs are. Sooner or later, they'll devise a setup which will require you to accept catastrophic losses to accomplish your mission. It won't have to be a reasonable scenario, or a situation likely to recur in action. All it has to do is be theoretically plausible and inflict massive losses on the wing for minimal results. Because when they pull it off, that's the exercise they'll use as the baseline for their report to the Admiralty.'

Harmon stared at her, and Truman sighed. The LAC wing's CO was a brilliant officer in her own iconoclastic way, but she came from a non-naval family. In many ways, she reminded Truman of Honor Harrington, for despite Alfred Harrington's career as a Navy surgeon, Honor had also come from a family with few or no naval ancestors and accomplished all she had on the basis of raw ability. Alice Truman, on the other hand, was the daughter of a vice admiral, the granddaughter of a captain and a rear admiral, and the great-granddaughter of a commodore, two rear admirals, and a first space lord. She understood the Byzantine feuds and machinations of the Royal Navy's great dynasties as Jacquelyn Harmon never would, and she knew exactly how Holderman and his fellows could—and would—go about killing or delaying Operation Anzio. She even understood that they'd do it because they honestly believed it to be their duty. The only problem was that she couldn't let them, for the Navy desperately needed the potential the Shrikes represented.

'Trust me on this, Jackie,' she said as gently as she could. 'I don't say they can kill the concept outright, because I don't think they can. It makes too much sense, we need it too badly, and it's got too many supporters. But they can delay it by another year or even two, and we can't afford that.'

'But how will pissing them off stop them?'

'Because unless I miss my guess, Holderman is so hot right this minute that he can hardly wait to get back to Hancock Base, call in the umpires, and start twisting tomorrow's exercise like a pretzel,' Truman said cheerfully. 'By the time he's done, the sim's outcome will be the worst disaster for your LAC wing since Amos Parnell left a month early for the Third Battle of Yeltsin.'

'And that's a good thing?' Harmon demanded, her expression aghast, and Truman chuckled.

'It's a wonderful thing, Jackie, because I've already drafted a dispatch to Admiral Adcock's attention at BuWeaps—with information copies to Admiral Caparelli, Vice Admiral Givens at BuPlan, Vice Admiral Danvers at BuShips, and Vice Admiral Tanith Hill at BuTrain—expressing my concern that the sims are being written unrealistically.'

Harmon's eyes widened, for that was five of the Space Lords of the Board of Admiralty. In fact, it was all of them except for Admiral Cortez and Vice Admiral Mannock, the heads of BuPers and the Surgeon General, respectively. Truman saw her expression and smiled.

'Naturally I would never attribute intentional bias to anyone,' she said piously, 'but for whatever reason, I feel I've discerned a... failure to fully and fairly examine the capabilities of the LAC-carrier concept in the last few exercises. In fact, I'm afraid the problem is becoming more pronounced, and so I've brought it to the attention of all the relevant authorities, exactly as I'm supposed to. Unfortunately, Chief Mantooth somehow neglected to forward a copy to Admiral Holderman or any other member of the evaluation board here in Hancock. A terrible oversight, of course. Doubtless the board's copies simply got lost in transit someplace.'

'You mean—?' Harmon stared at her in something very like awe.

'I mean the Powers That Be are going to have ample reason to look very, very carefully at the parameters of the sims and how they came to be written as they are. And what they're going to find is a steady procession of successes by the LACs followed—hopefully— by a single, crushing, overwhelming failure. Which will cause them to look even more carefully at that particular exercise, talk to the umpires... and discover just how the parameters were changed, and by whom.' Truman smiled nastily. 'I suspect Admiral Holderman and Commodore Paget will have just a little explaining to do after that.'

'Jesus, Alice,' Harmon said. She was silent for several seconds, then she shook her head. 'I see what you're up to, but what if he doesn't bite? What if he just bides his time? And what if he decides to get even with you down the line? He's a rear admiral, after all.'

'First, I think he's too pissed off—and too convinced he's right—to resist the bait,' Truman replied. 'Second, the seed is planted. Even if he waits another few days—or even longer—sooner or later he'll push a little too hard, and when he does, the trap will spring. And as for getting even with me—' She shrugged. 'If he reacts the way I expect him to, he'll cut his own throat. His career may survive it, but any move he ever makes to hit back at me will be seen as a vengeful senior trying to use his position to punish a junior who was simply doing her job when he made himself look like an idiot. Oh, sure, some people will figure out what really happened—and a few will